If the front-office nabobs had a tendency to take the demise of Saul Stafford somewhat lightly, it was not a feeling shared on the third floor of Writers’ where very little work was in progress that morning. In Gertrude’s office there was a gathering of the secretaries, Lillian and fat Clara and one or two others, all talking a blue streak and reading the morning papers.
The Stafford story was on page nineteen of the Times whose modest one-column head was “ACCIDENT FATAL TO SCENARIST.” Even the Examiner went no further than “DEATH DRAWS CURTAIN ON PLAYBOY WRITER’S MADCAP LIFE.” Both papers discreetly omitted the name Mammoth, saying only “a major studio.”
“Take it easy, Lil,” Gertrude said. “They didn’t even mention your name.”
“There are a lot of things that didn’t get into the paper,” Lillian said sharply.
“And that won’t, dearie,” Gertrude interposed. She looked up as the elevator door clanged and Miss Hildegarde Withers came up to the window. Then she carefully wrote down “10:35 A.M.—Withers in.”
“Good morning,” greeted the schoolteacher. “By the way, do you keep a record like that for everyone?”
Gertrude nodded. “It’s a sort of studio rule. Not so much to check up on the hours people keep and how many callers they have as it is to have a record of where all writers are—in case the producer or supervisor wants to get in touch with them.”
“You don’t throw the sheets away, do you?” Miss Withers pressed on. “I was thinking particularly of yesterday afternoon.” She suddenly lowered her voice, realizing that the secretaries were listening so hard that you could almost feel it. “Could I see that record?”
“I’m very sorry, Miss Withers, but—”
“It isn’t just idle curiosity,” insisted the schoolteacher. “It struck me that no one can come out of the elevator without being seen from where you sit. Nor can anyone come up the stairs and pass to any one of the offices in this wing. In other words, you have a complete check on everything.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s against the studio rules,” Gertrude announced. “Besides, I’ve turned in the report to Mr Lothian.”
“Thank you just the same,” said Miss Withers, and started down the hall. The way lay clear before her with two approaches to the problem. She could, of course, attack it through the usual door of “who?” Who had opportunity, who had motive, who had the type of mind that would incline toward murder as the answer to an emotional impasse? Or she could come at it backwards through the personality of the victim.
She went into her own office, removed the top-heavy hat which was her trademark and placed it beside her umbrella. Then she crossed over to the connecting door. As she turned the knob the schoolteacher took a deep breath, steeling herself against what she was about to face. After all, the glorified junk shop was something of a shock to any sensitive nature. The dive into a dime museum, into a magpie’s nest of small, bright objects, was not a thing to be taken lightly. But it was the back door to Stafford’s mind, the way to an understanding of what he had been and why he met the end he did.
She came through the door, stopped short and for as long as one might have counted ten she stood, stiff and unbelieving. Then she reached for the telephone. “What’s happened to this office?”
Gertrude finally understood. “Oh, the janitor always straightens up when a writer leaves. Everything personal was packed up last night.”
Completely disconsolate, Miss Hildegarde Withers looked upon an office as neat and impersonal as a blank sheet of paper. Gone were the posters, gone the gadgets, gone the magpie’s nest. And gone the clues, gone with the wind.
There was nothing, absolutely nothing, which carried any message for her. She looked all through the desk drawers, under and inside the blotting pad, everywhere. Once for a moment she thought that she had struck pay dirt, for on the margin of the desk blotter she found the scribbled notation, “Laval—Ox 7003.” Eagerly she picked up the phone and asked to have the number dialed for her, but the ringing at the other end of the line was a curious double buzz, and the exchange operator finally cut in to say that Oxford 7003 had been discontinued.
Finally she abandoned the search and went back to her own office where she stared glumly at her desk and waited for a hunch. None came, but she had an interruption in the shape of Buster who entered, bearing a large sealed envelope with red “Important” stickers all over it.
“From Mr Nincom’s office,” he announced. “Say, Miss Withers, is it true what they’re saying? That you’re a detective and—?”
“I wonder,” she said glumly. “I wonder if I’m a detective or a—Never mind.” She shook her head. “By the way, how is the romance burgeoning? Did you follow my suggestion about dropping Confucius overboard?”
Buster’s shoulders sagged. “I didn’t have the chance. I mean, Jill is sort of out of reach right now. Confucius say, ‘Girl who think about money have no time for think about love.’”
“Oh yes, the sweepstake thing. Well, she’ll get over that.”
“Maybe,” he said doubtfully. “Maybe she’ll get over it too quick. Because the drawing for the Irish Sweep doesn’t take place for two weeks yet. So that cablegram from Dublin is a phony!”
“Does Jill Madison know that?”
He shrugged. “I’m not going to be the one to tell her!” And Buster departed. Miss Withers started to open the envelope.
After a few minutes she was interrupted by the telephone. It was her agent, the energetic Mr Wagman. “Just wanted to see if everything is okay,” he queried. “I meant to drop in on you, but this Stafford tragedy has complicated matters. He was my best client, you know. Him and Dobie.”
“Complicated?”
“Yeah. They had a contract as a team. Now there’s only one of them. I’m trying to get Dobie kept on alone. If it fails it’s for one reason. He’s got a reputation as a trouble maker.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. It doesn’t pay in this business to make trouble. Such as”—here Wagman’s voice dropped—“such as going around talking about murder and so on. You were hired for a different job, you know.” His tone was friendly enough, but there was somewhere a subtle threat.
“Thank you,” said Miss Withers gently, and hung up. Then she took up the sheaf of screen play which Nincom had sent her. She opened it, looked at the title, Miss Lizzie Borden, and at the long list of writers whose names had been set down as contributors. She read:
SEQUENCE “A”
Fade in:
Exterior Borden mansion—Full shot (Day)
A-1 A big white mansion with white pillars, many porticoes, etc. In the b.g. is the Sound, with the masts of seven or eight of the Borden whaling fleet showing above the house. On the lawn are twelve or fifteen young people, all dressed in the costume of the Gay Nineties, playing a fast game of croquet. Foremost among them is LIZZIE BORDEN, young and lovely, the belle of the town. She suddenly turns and runs toward camera, laughing and following the ball. JOHN ELLIS follows her.
A-2 Closer shot—LIZZIE and ELLIS
He is a tall, gay young blade. (Gary Cooper type)
He raises his mallet to hit the ball.
LIZZIE (Frightened)
Oh no! Stop!
Camera pans down to close shot as Lizzie carefully brushes big blue butterfly from ball.
LIZZIE
(Reproachfully)
Ellis, you might have crushed it!
(To butterfly)
Go on, you lovely thing….
Miss Withers pushed the script away. “Go on yourself,” she muttered, remembering the town of Fall River as she knew it, remembering that narrow, proper little street on which stood the boxlike Borden house. Then there were the photographs of Lizzie herself, that tight-lipped, cold-blooded president of the Christian Endeavor Society. Belle of the town, indeed!
Miss Withers looked up suddenly to see that her door was being softly opened. Lillian entered on tiptoe, looking more lush and sultry than ever. Something had imp
elled her to wear black today, evidently out of respect for the dead, but the dress she had chosen was of the slinky cocktail variety, giving an extremely gala effect.
“I only have a minute,” Lillian said. “Gertrude’s gone to lunch, and I asked to spell her at the board again today. Just so I could copy this list off for you. She was lying when she said she didn’t have it.”
And she handed Miss Withers a hastily scrawled record of the comings and goings of the floor for yesterday afternoon. The schoolteacher brightened considerably. “And nobody comes in or out of the hall without being checked?”
“Nobody,” Lillian said.
“Then if Stafford was murdered the murderer’s name should be on this list.”
“I—I guess so.” Lillian was in a hurry to get away.
Once alone, Miss Hildegarde Withers bent over the list. It didn’t matter what went on here before about three yesterday because that was the time when she had seen Stafford alive and reasonably well. That left approximately two hours.
Sometime in that hundred and twenty minutes Saul Stafford had died. According to the record, at three yesterday most of the writers of the floor had been in their offices. The only exceptions were Mr Virgil Dobie who was supposed to be out on the set watching the shooting of his latest picture and Mr Wilfred Josef who was supposed to be in Good Samaritan Hospital. She read:
P.M.
3:10—Mr Firsk in
3:18—Clara in for Mr Abend
3:40—Miss Withers phoned Mr Nincom
3:48—Mrs Firsk phoned in to Mr Josef (no message)
3:50—Mr Parlay Jones phoned Mr Dobie (call transf. Stage 4)
4:05—Mr Pape for Mr Abend
4:07—Mr August out (to hamburger stand)
4:12—Lillian in (to Mr Dobie’s office)
4:15—Mr Wagman in for Mr Firsk
4.17—Clara out
4:20—Clara in
4:25—Mr Wagman out
4:27—Mr August in
4:34—Lillian out
4:35—Mr Pape out
4:38—Buster in (package for Miss W)
4:45—Buster out
4:57—Miss Withers called police (call trans. to Sansom)
The schoolteacher pondered over this chart for some time, coming at last to the unpleasant conclusion that at the hour when she knew Saul Stafford to have died almost any person on the floor could have killed him. Any person, that is, who knew how to break a man’s neck without leaving a mark.
She put the list carefully aside for the moment. It was, she decided, lunch time. On her way down the hall Lillian gave her a conspiratorial wink. “Oh, there’s a telegram for you, Miss Withers!” the girl cried after her, and thrust a yellow envelope under the window.
Miss Withers stared at it thoughtfully all the way down in the elevator. Because the envelope had been opened and very amateurishly stuck back together again.
It turned out to be from the inspector. Luckily he had used the code which Miss Withers had worked out for such occasions, a code resulting from the simple expedient of placing one’s hands one space to the right on a typewriter keyboard. That made the first word, “Jsttod,” spell “Harris.” She read: “HARRIS FILE SHOWS NO PHOTO OF LAVAL. HAVE FRAGMENTARY PRINT RECORD ONE FINGER. QUERIED DR VAN DONNEN WHO SAYS PRACTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE FOR EVEN STRONG MAN TO BREAK ANOTHER’S NECK. WOULD BE INTENSE STRUGGLE AND MARKED BRUISES. WHAT TREE ARE YOU BARKING UP? OSCAR PIPER.”
“I only wish I knew,” said the schoolteacher unhappily as she put the wire away in her handbag. If Dr Max Van Donnen said it would be practically impossible for anyone to break a man’s neck, then it was practically impossible. Max knew, or he wouldn’t be the greatest police laboratory expert in the country.
Somehow the urge to see the stars lunching in the studio commissary had left Miss Withers. She marched through the studio gates in search of a little sandwich stand that she remembered seeing across the street.
But it was no sandwich stand that caught her eye now. There was the usual panorama of cowboy bit players, tourists peering from their dusty Chevrolets with the Midwestern license plates, children with Brownies and autograph books. And there was Jill Madison.
Miss Withers had seen that girl very slightly, and never as she was now. Jill walked up and down in front of the studio gates, four paces north, turn, four paces south.
“Mercy me!” said the schoolteacher to herself. “Did you ever see a scream walking!” Because that girl was an unstable chemical combination about ready to explode. She was a coiled spring, a set trap. She was trouble on high heels.
Miss Withers came up beside her. “Good afternoon, my dear.”
Jill Madison, neat as a pin in a cheap, smart blue suit and a bravely ridiculous jockey cap with a feather in it, stopped short. She flashed a mechanical smile and nodded.
The schoolteacher could think of half a dozen questions she would have liked to ask Miss Madison, but this was neither the time nor the place. She went on across the street. This was none of her business. Or was it? Anyway, when she had finished her “Fan Mail Special”—one stuffed lamb chop with tea or coffee, fifty-five cents—and come out into the sunlight again Jill was still doing her guard duty.
Wait! She had stopped.
An open Packard with a special Darrin body rolled up to the curb outside the main gate. Virgil Dobie started to slide out. That was as far as he got, because Jill caught him flat-footed, the palm of her hand meeting his cheeks with the hard, vicious snap of a .22 rifle.
Jill Madison began to call him things in a low but sincere tone. She must have picked up the words from Mr Nincom, the schoolteacher thought, and then of course rephrased them to advantage.
For a moment there were red handprints on Dobie’s face, and then they were blotted out by a tide of blush red which worked up from his neck. He said something to the girl which she would not hear and which Miss Withers, however she might gape, could not.
Then Dobie caught Jill Madison by both wrists, dragged her into the car and drove off. It was all over in a moment, so quickly, indeed, that the loungers outside the studio gates barely saw that anything was wrong. Dobie had not wasted any time in nipping that scene in the bud, the schoolteacher acknowledged.
She would very much have liked to follow the red Packard, but there was no taxi in sight. So she went on inside the gates again.
Up on the third floor Gertrude was just taking over the switchboard from Lillian, and both of them were talking to a man who seemed to be terribly surprised at everything. That, she realized a moment later, was because he had no eyebrows or eyelashes and his little beard was only a ragged memory.
“Miss Withers, this is Mr Wilfred Josef,” Gertrude said.
She shook a limp, damp paw. “I was just telling the girls,” said Josef, “that I should have stayed in the hospital. Those nurses gave me a lot of new limericks. There’s one about the young lady, named Lassiter, Who screamed when a man made a pass at her….” He took out a cigarette. “And the young couple, named Kelly, who—”
“I beg your pardon?” said Miss Withers.
“Okay, okay,” Josef told her. “But when I heard about old Stafford I started writing one on him. I mean a clean one. Listen. There was an old Stafford, named Saul, Who got killed, so they say, by a fall. He landed, by heck, on the back of his neck, And nobody minded at all!” Josef guffawed at his own composition. Then he started to light his cigarette, thrust the match from him with a shrill yelp.
“What’s the matter?” Gertrude asked, wide eyed.
He put the cigarette down, unlighted. “Nothing. Just a sort of phobia or something, the doctor says. It may be a long time before I can light a cigarette. Guess I’ll have to learn to chew, huh?”
His tone was light and gay. Too light and too gay, Miss Withers thought. “The burned child …” she quoted to herself, and quietly withdrew.
“Here’s another,” Josef was saying. “There was a young girl from Purdue, Who covered her—”
“I
think maybe you shocked Miss Withers,” Gertrude said, looking down the hall.
Far from being shocked, Miss Hildegarde Withers was at the moment intent upon breaking and entering. As she lingered in the office she had noticed the mark, “12:55—Abend out,” on the pad. Dobie’s office would be locked. But perhaps the connecting door would not be. Perhaps …
Mr Abend did not lock his office. Perhaps the room would stand some investigation, but there was no time for that now. She held her breath and tried the connecting door which must lead into Virgil Dobie’s office. It was open.
She found herself in a room obviously arranged for a big man who liked to be comfortable. The easy chair was vast and upholstered in red leather, with a big footstool. The couch had a spring mattress and big pillows, well rumpled. There was a reflecting reading lamp, and on one wall a white square of silvered composition which she imagined was a projection screen. Beside that was a small blackboard on a stand, now washed clean. Another wall held a cork bulletin board pinned with numerous newspaper reviews of the pictures which Dobie and Stafford had written.
Miss Hildegarde Withers sat calmly down at the desk and started to snoop through Virgil Dobie’s possessions. The flat top drawers showed only stationery, both the studio type and an expensive hot-press note paper. There was a big sheaf of unanswered mail, including a letter from some New York publisher reminding Dobie that they awaited with breathless anxiety the remainder of the novel he had promised them two years before. There was numerous correspondence in regard to the purchase of rare books and to the binding of other books, usually in full leather. There were numerous bills for camera equipment, clothes, liquor and so forth, but none was more than four weeks old.
Among the bills was a receipt from the Postal Telegraph Company to the amount of $23.25, covering a cable and remittance to Mr Eugene Gach, care of Mammoth Distributing Corporation, Dublin, Eire. There was a bank statement from the Security-First National showing that Mr Dobie had a cash balance of $14,889.43.
One drawer remained, a drawer containing folded copies of today’s Times and Examiner and a cryptic sheet of blue paper on which someone had scrawled cryptic lines of figures. For a moment Miss Withers thought that she had stumbled upon a modern Rosetta stone. The sheet had been so folded, handled, tattered, that she thought it must be important and copied it off without the slightest idea of what it meant. She put down:
Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan Page 5